The TAOS Project: Statistical Analysis of Multi-Telescope Time Series Data

Abstract

The Taiwanese-American Occultation Survey (TAOS) monitors fields of up to\n~1000 stars at 5 Hz simultaneously with four small telescopes to detect\noccultation events from small (~1 km) Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs). The survey\npresents a number of challenges, in particular the fact that the occultation\nevents we are searching for are extremely rare and are typically manifested as\nslight flux drops for only one or two consecutive time series measurements. We\nhave developed a statistical analysis technique to search the multi-telescope\ndata set for simultaneous flux drops which provides a robust false positive\nrejection and calculation of event significance. In this paper, we describe in\ndetail this statistical technique and its application to the TAOS data set.\n